I'm not overly keen on the tooling: as far as I can tell the whole industry is prone to flagging false positives as "vulnerabilities" rather than "potential vulnerabilities" and it's a bit too easy to turn those reports into a tick-box "you must update now because the tool says so". But they also do flag true vulnerabilities. And they pay for teams of security researchers to find and fix issues, not least because that's good marketing.
For my rust applications, I use "cargo audit" which checks all dependencies against the CVEs. For my typescript and javascript applications, deno audit and/or yarn npm audit.
For the rest of the stack `debsecan` does exactly what you want on Ubuntu: report CVEs for installed software.
Maybe it would be worth it to have an agent that knows your stack, reads the top threads on hn all day long and messages you when it thinks there is something serious going on that could impact you.
Some have free licenses, many don't.
Sometimes build time is too slow (e.g., a repo that doesn't receive updates every day or so).
PHP2SHELL, in particular, made me expand my weekly security review to include my external network resources.
The natural conclusion for this seems to be realtime monitoring CVE and pre-CVE vulnerability indications in exposed stacks.
I hope that someone has some sort of a reasonable approach here / I would love to help work on something open source if not
But, certainly do your own threat assessment and develop and implement whatever plan works for you.